A Study of Poetry Part 15

"Death lays his _icy hand_ on Kings."

"I wandered _lonely as a cloud_."

Sometimes his imagination fuses various aspects of an object into a composite effect:

"A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night; It was the _plant and flower of light_."

The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always catch at imagery. It may deal directly with the fact, as in Burns's immortal

"If we ne'er had met sae kindly, If we ne'er had loved sae blindly, Never loved, and never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with pa.s.sionate feeling, idealizes objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is never the dry clear light of noon.

"She was _a phantom_ of delight."

"Thy soul was _like a star_, and dwelt apart, Thou hadst a voice whose sound was _like the sea_, Pure as _the naked heavens_...."

This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of immaterialities.

Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now little inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains true that the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful"

resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or pa.s.sion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse.

The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative imagination, which may be, after all, only the "fancy" taking a deeper plunge. In the familiar song from _The Tempest_, for example, we have in the second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty of the last three lines of the stanza,--the lines that are graven upon Sh.e.l.ley's tombstone in Rome:

"Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."

So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories, while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. For the deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the imaginative conception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet's contemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in Wordsworth's superb couplet in the "Ode to Duty":

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong."

And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic from whom an instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, was as much perplexed by them as Jeffrey.

_6. Lyric Expression_

Is it possible to formulate the laws of lyric expression? "I do not mean by expression," said Gray, "the mere choice of words, but the whole dress, fashion, and arrangement of a thought."

[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 333. (Gosse ed.)]

Taking expression, in this larger sense, as the final element in that threefold process by which poetry comes into being, and which has been discussed in an earlier chapter, we may a.s.sert that there are certain general laws of lyric form. One of them is the law of brevity. It is impossible to keep the lyric pitch for very long. The rapture turns to pain. "I need scarcely observe," writes Poe in his essay on "The Poetic Principle," "that a poem deserves its t.i.tle only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychical necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would ent.i.tle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such."

In another pa.s.sage, from the essay on "Hawthorne's 'Twice-Told Tales,'"

Poe emphasizes this law of brevity in connection with the law of unity of impression. It is one of the cla.s.sic pa.s.sages of American literary criticism:

"Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all cla.s.ses of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance.

It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem _too_ brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression.

Without a certain continuity of effort--without a certain duration or repet.i.tion of purpose--the soul is never deeply moved."

Gray's a.n.a.lysis of the law of lyric brevity is picturesque, and too little known:

"The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon,--the verdure of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, a.s.sumed a style of graver colors, and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there, where it best became her.... To pa.s.s on a sudden from the lyric glare to the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense)...."

[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)]

It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be disa.s.sociated.

The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric corresponds to the unity of action in the drama, and to the unity of effect in the short story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon "some single thought, feeling, or situation." The sonnets, for instance, that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought.

This thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave pa.s.ses into the s.e.xtet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an unexpected way. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be as integral as the sonnet's form. So must it be with any song. The various devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a single emotional reflection of some situation or desire.

Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of grammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browning and Sh.e.l.ley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of their lyrics by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easily intelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems have been loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but the intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at the cost of true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had an unerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas into "pure, perspicuous and musical form."

"Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented, well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk nonsense, or do you understand me?"

[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed.)]

Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly that restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master, insisted that there was a further lyric law,--the law of vagueness or indefiniteness. "I know," he writes in his "Marginalia," "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it of its breath of faery. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciable idea--a thing of the earth, earthy."

This reads like a defence of Poe's own private practice, and yet many poets and critics are inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, for instance, goes quite as far as Poe. "The truth is that poetry, which is the expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds its appropriate material in _vague_ words--words of large import and with many meanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test for determining the poetic fitness of words, a test which every true poet unconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in the direction of what is commonplace or of what is technical, is always unpoetical."

[Footnote: _What is Poetry_, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.]

This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagist theory of "hardness and economy of speech; the exact word," and it also would rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail, steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly delighted our generation. No one who admires the splendid vitality of "McAndrew's Hymn"

is really troubled by the slang and lingo of the engine-room.

One of the most charming pa.s.sages in Stedman's _Nature and Elements of Poetry_ (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers that fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in their very frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "The Paradox":

"'T is evanescence that endures; The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life."

But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be a.n.a.lysed in prose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer," or to remember what Duke Orsino says in Twelfth Night:

"Enough; no more: 'T is not so sweet now as it was before."

7._ Expression and Impulse_

A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to the lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set lyric pattern.

"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right."

No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance.

Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical organization and his muscular habits. There are as many "styles" as there are players, and yet each player strives for "style," i.e. economy and precision and grace of muscular effort, and each will a.s.sert that the chief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through." "And every single one of them is right."

Apply this a.n.a.logy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as we have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable "states of soul." Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for it, something corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball"

and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on _The Elizabethan Lyric_, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to express itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. If the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he must first show us the urn." Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine attempts it, in a highly suggestive a.n.a.lysis: "Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the first the emotional stimulus is given--the object, the situation, or the thought from which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element rea.s.serts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute."

[Footnote: _The Elizabethan Lyric_, p. 17.]

Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the _Golden Treasury_, and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric is approximated in practice. My own impression is that the critic postulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English song will supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one may look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric expression into certain lines of order.

Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms?

The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical expression is in reality very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh"

and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in a moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of emotional a.s.sociation, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the personality of the poet.

CHAPTER VIII

RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC